This invention relates to a hand-held tufted carpet mender and more particularly to such a mender having the capability of selectively mending at two pile heights.
In the manufacture of tufted carpet when a defect caused by the failure of a tufting machine needle to tuft a loop into the backing material occurs, as when the needle unthreads or the strand of yarn fed to the needle is broken, the carpet is often mended by means of a hand-held mender known in the art as a mending gun.
Typically, an operator standing behind the tufting machine inspects the fabric as it leaves the tufting machine, and if a defect is sighted, a mending gun would be utilized to repair the defect. Traditional mending guns, such as those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,388,881, and 5,555,826, are pneumatically powered to reciprocate a needle into and out of the tufted fabric at the location of the missing loops of yarn, and a strand of yarn is constantly fed to the needle. The operator may then "mend" the locations where the defect is located. However, these mending guns are configured to mend at a single pile height.
A number of years ago, tufting machines were configured to tuft carpet with at least two loop height levels to create a patterned rug effect. The need to provide a single mending gun with the ability to selectively mend two different pile heights was then created. Stopping to manually adjust the settings on a single traditional mending gun every time the pile height changed or requiring multiple mending guns with different pile height settings were not believed to be satisfactory solutions.
One prior art solution utilized a remote electrical control box which allowed a spotter to watch from the finished side of the carpet as an operator utilized the mending gun on the backing side. The operator would continuously mend the carpet as instructed by the spotter, while the spotter would remotely control a solenoid on the mending gun which switched the pile height setting from high to low upon the continuous depression of a switch. When the spotter released the switch, the solenoid would automatically return to the high pile height position. There was no provision for the remote electronically controlled mending gun to remain in a low-pile height tufting position without continuous depression of a switch by the second individual, i.e., the spotter, with the remote.